There was no word about where he had gone, or why, or how long he would be gone other than "soon," which was useless. Was it something dangerous -- was that why he chose to go alone, to keep me safe? Because if so, then how could I be sure he would be back soon, or even that he would come back at all?
With my heart threatening to pound out of my chest, I began pacing the floor. He'd said nothing last night about any errands. Claudia had broken off their relationship, so he wasn't sneaking out to spend time with her. Or at least, I thought the relationship was over. If she wanted him back, I knew he'd agree to it in an instant. He talked about her all the time while we were digging. But our conversations about her always ended with him knowing they could never be together. Claudia was fiercely loyal to her father, and her father was no less loyal to the GDR. He wouldn't trust Fritz within a kilometer of her.
Finally, I gave up pacing. Not because my anxiety was any better but because I suspected whoever was on the other end of the hidden microphones might somehow figure out I was pacing and wonder why.
We had dishes in the kitchen sink that hadn't been done in days. I washed those up and then swept the floor of all the dirt we had tracked in. Slowly, I became absorbed in that work, because even if I didn't know what was happening with Fritz, at least I was doing something.
I went to make my bed, but realized the sheets were filthy from the dirt that came in on my hair and clothes at night. It didn't seem right to make up an unclean bed, but I didn't feel like washing the sheets and hanging them to dry either. A quick glance at Fritz's bed showed his was even worse than mine, and I left them both unmade.
It was only then as I slowed down that I realized how hungry I was. I'd missed supper last night and the sandwiches I made for Fritz and me at lunch got thinner every day. Fritz hadn't told me how much money Mama sent in her last letter, but he felt like we ought to save whatever was left for tunneling supplies rather than groceries.
The more I went through our empty cupboards, the more I disagreed. We needed food.
Mama kept a cookie jar on top of the refrigerator. I never went into it because as far as I could tell, it had never held cookies or sweets of any kind. But our food supplies were getting low. If she had stashed anything in there, I wanted it.
I opened the cookie jar and immediately all my hopes deflated. It was empty, of food anyway. An old envelope was at the bottom, though, and I pulled it out, then caught my breath in my throat.
It was a letter from Papa.
The stamp dated it to September 1961, about the time the wall replaced the barbed-wire fence. I pulled out his letter, which began, To my dear family. But every line after that was blacked out with thick black marker. Every single line.
No wonder Papa never wrote to us. There was no point in it.
The envelope was addressed with our apartment number and the return address came from West Berlin. If the return address was current, then that was where Papa lived now.
And maybe his letters were blacked out, but if I wrote him, would my words be blacked out too? I couldn't see anything wrong with a daughter writing to her father in the west. No matter who the father was, and no matter what the daughter really wanted, it should be okay. Well, that last part wasn't true. I had to be careful.
The letter I wrote to my father was simple. I said nothing more than what absolutely had to be written and weighed each word carefully, just in case the Stasi intercepted it.
Papa,
I hope all is well with you. We are all fine, though Mama is out of the city to take care of Oma Gertrude's broken leg. Could you please send some money to help us plant a garden? Fritz is looking for work and we need a little extra.
Love,
Gerta
I debated whether to mention anything about the tunnel, but couldn't figure out a way to word it that wouldn't tip off the Stasi. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, none of them more important than whether Fritz and I were doing what he wanted by digging that tunnel. But I wasn't foolish enough to write a question like that.
Before I could talk myself out of sending the letter, I put a stamp on it and then ran down to the street to drop it in the post-office box. That's where I was when Fritz came running up to me with a paper in one hand and a bag in the other.
"What are you doing out here?" he asked.
"Nothing." I frowned at him. "Where were you? I've been worried!"
Fritz pulled me near the wall of our building and showed me the paper. "They're called Schrebergarten, allotted spaces for interested families. The state gives permission to garden in certain areas, legally. I went to ask if we might use that small piece of land near the Welcome Building to make a garden. This paper is our permit, and in this bag I even have some small gardening tools and corn seeds."
"They just gave them to us?"
"The condition is that we don't own the land and we certainly can't live on it. And technically, they'll own everything we grow, though they said we could share in the harvest."
"They don't mind that it's so near the wall?"
"A lot of farmland comes up to the wall, so they're used to it." Fritz's smile was so wide it nearly spread off his face. "Don't you see? We have a reason to be there now, even their permission! We don't have to sneak on and off the property anymore."
My brow furrowed. "We have files, Fritz. Why would they give us permission?"
Fritz shrugged. "The Stasi keep the files -- maybe the agriculture office doesn't know about them." He showed me the paper again. "This is good news, Gerta! This could save us!"
I couldn't share his relief or excitement. This only changed one big problem into a different sort of worry. "Yes, but now we'll have to build a garden instead of digging. When are we going to do that?"
Fritz smiled, still pleased with himself. "We'll figure it out, Gerta. Now, c'mon! We've got work to do!"
A steady drop will carve the stone. -- German proverb
As slow as it was to dig out the rock in the tunnel, at least we had been making progress there. The next few days were spent almost entirely in the garden, working hard for no other purpose than as a cover for what we were actually doing -- or should have been doing.
I didn't mind the idea of gardening, but the weeds were thick and sometimes thorny and, by the third day, it was hard to care about the dirt out here when I really wanted to be down in the tunnel, working. After an entire afternoon of pointless, sweaty labor, I didn't think the weeds looked any better than when we first began.
When the heat of the day hit us, Fritz and I decided to sneak inside the building to get back to our real work. As before, he went into the tunnel while I removed dirt with the bucket.
But the small basement room was already piling high with dirt, and that bothered me. We had a long way to go before we reached the west. What if we ran out of places to store the dirt? Something needed to be done with it.
I briefly toyed with the idea of returning to the weeding. At least the weeds didn't require me to think so much. Then I smiled as a wonderful idea came to my mind. If it worked, it would solve both my problems.
Rather than dump out the bucket inside the basement, I opened the boarded window and dumped it there. It made a much smaller pile than I expected, so I refilled the bucket from the dirt already in the basement and dumped it outside too. After five or six loads of dirt, I climbed outside and then used the small hand rake from the state to spread the dirt around. It went down smooth and dark and covered up every single weed beneath it.
I didn't need to pull weeds -- I could cover them up!
Sure, our vegetable seeds wouldn't grow very well once they hit that hard ground a few centimeters down, but I didn't care about that. I didn't plan to be here that long.
With renewed energy, I began emptying dirt from the basement. The routine was the same, to dump several loads at once and then spread it out. I did it slowly and tried to make it look as if I was pulling weeds rather than covering them. The watchtower was far enough awa
y that unless the guards looked carefully, there wouldn't be any reason to investigate further. Or at least, I hoped not. I was always listening for the approaching sounds of one of their vehicles.
After a while, Fritz called up to ask what I was doing, and when I invited him up to see it for himself, he only chuckled and brushed his hand across my head. "Trust you to do so much hard work to get out of other work," he said. "But don't go so fast. If someone is looking for progress, they'll never believe we got all that weeded in a day."
He was right, and I returned to carrying dirt back up the ladder. Over and over, that was my routine.
Climb down to the air-raid shelter. Scoop dirt into the bucket, hook it over my arm, climb up the ladder, dump it out. Repeat. Again and again and again. Rest a little, and then start all over. I'd lost track days ago of how many times I made the climb; I could do this now in my sleep. Who knows? I was so tired, maybe I did.
I usually took my rests in the shelter while I watched Fritz's progress. He was nearly five meters into the tunnel, and kept track of how straight it was with some boards he had nailed together perpendicular to each other. If one end was always kept straight with the shelter's entrance, the other end should point like an arrow in the direction he should dig.
One late afternoon, Fritz said he would lift the buckets for me if I would go and find water to refill his canteen. It required a short walk back to the main part of the city, but I was eager for the change of routine.
I stripped off my overalls and stopped by the pond to wash my face and hands -- if I was going to convince a restaurant to give me water, I needed to be presentable enough to walk inside. Then I set off toward a nearby sausage shop where my family used to eat.
When I was almost to the restaurant, my eye roamed across the street to a building that had been bombed during the war and still hadn't been repaired. Attempts had been made to clear it some years ago -- I could tell that because of some rusty old machinery and other pieces of equipment left on the site. There was even a long rope with a pulley attached so that the heavier items could be lifted onto trucks.
A pulley!
My mind began racing as I pictured that very item in the basement of the Welcome Building. With a pulley, there would be no more climbing up and down the ladder. Fritz could fill the dirt below and I could pull it up with a rope and then empty it in the basement. We could work twice as fast with half the effort. I needed that pulley!
"Gerta? What are you doing here?"
I swerved around and saw that Anna had come up behind me. Her mother was already seated inside the restaurant where I intended to get water, though I hadn't noticed either of them before now. It shouldn't have surprised me to see them here -- this was their neighborhood, after all. But of course she would be surprised to see me, and looking as dirty as I'm sure I did.
I stepped back and forced a smile to my face. "Fritz and I are gardening, like I told you about earlier. I just came to refill our canteens."
"Let me get it for you," she said, and then wrinkled up her nose. "No offense, but you smell like you're up to your eyeballs in gardening."
That was true enough, in a way. I handed her our canteens and she took them inside while I waited, trying as hard as I could not to look at the pulley on the other side of the street. It was only attached by another thick rope. With a good knife, I could cut it free ... but when? Certainly not on a day as busy as this one. The problem was that in this neighborhood, every day was busy. It was only at night, after curfew, when everything went quiet. After a few minutes, Anna emerged with full canteens of water so cold I could feel it through the metal. I wanted to gulp down an entire one right then.
"Thank you," I said, rather awkwardly.
She called out a "you're welcome" as I walked away, which thoroughly confused me. Were we friends again? Why? Nothing had changed. Unless it had changed on her end. Maybe the Stasi had decided to leave her family alone and she felt safe to be friends with me again. I didn't know if I was ready for that. After all, she had treated me horribly over the last couple of months. And I had much bigger things on my mind than anyone's friendship.
Which included a need to get into her apartment, I reminded myself. For the sake of the tunnel, I would have to make things good between us, and soon.
But in the meantime, I had a pulley to steal.
If you live among wolves, you have to act like a wolf.
-- Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Union premier, 1958-1964
I didn't tell Fritz my plan. Not only would he have accused me of every kind of stupidity, but he also would've been right to do it. However, he couldn't feel the aches in my body every night after hauling up those buckets. It wasn't just my arms or shoulders -- every part of me was exhausted and sore. Each morning, I started more tired, and ended more drained. I was carrying lighter loads than when we first began, and fewer of them. If something didn't change by the end of the week, Fritz would be doing all the work while I sat aside, useless as the growing piles of dirt.
Police regularly patrolled the streets after curfew. But as young as I was, if they caught me, probably the worst thing to happen would be a ride home in their car with a slapped hand and another page for my file. Probably.
Unless I had already stolen the pulley by then, which would be impossible to explain. It would be reported to the Stasi, who would wonder what a twelve-year-old girl wanted with such a tool. They would find the tunnel, and we had gone too far for me to pretend Fritz hadn't been involved.
So it was decided, then. I couldn't get caught.
It was very early on a rainy Saturday morning when I snuck out of the apartment. My plan was to get the pulley before anyone else was allowed outside, and to be on my way home immediately after curfew was lifted. That way, I only had to sneak around in one direction. I wore my blandest clothes, which really only required a choice between Communist gray and Communist grayer. They would camouflage me against the walls in the early morning light. I also brought a small burlap sack and our sharpest kitchen knife.
Almost as soon as I got onto the street, a Trabant Kubel drove by, full of police, and I backed into the shadows of our doorway. The officers' rifles reflected from the streetlights and their shared laughter was coarse and louder than it ought to be for this early hour. Louder than it ever ought to be, actually. I wondered what men like them might find funny. Probably we had a different sense of humor, because nothing about our police force ever made me smile.
For several long minutes after they'd left, I fought against my instinct to go back inside. That would've been the smart thing to do. Then I reminded myself that tunneling beneath the Death Strip was hardly a smart act, so at least I was being consistent. After they could no longer be heard, I made myself take the first step onto the sidewalk, and after that I was committed. The streets were quieter than I'd ever seen them and it felt as though the entire city had been abandoned.
This was probably what my neighborhood would've become if the Berlin Wall hadn't gone up. We would've left, and Herr Krause too. A family who lived below us also had plans to leave once. I was sure there were others. Eventually, the whole city would've emptied out except for the most loyal party officials and the Stasi and Grenzer officers. Or what did I know? Maybe they would have left too, given the chance. Russia's new first secretary, Brezhnev, would have rolled through here on a tour from Moscow and found he was the leader of a vast country of empty buildings and overgrown farmland.
I balled up my courage and my fists along with it, rounding the safety of the corner while keeping as close to the shadows and coves as possible. I saw nobody, heard nobody, and, as far as I could tell, I was completely alone out here.
The next part of my walk was the most dangerous -- I had to dart across a street that was usually quite busy in the daytime. The rain would help, but it wasn't falling hard enough for a full camouflage, and even at a full sprint, it would take me two or three seconds to cross this wide street. I stayed hidden at the corner for several minutes
, steeling my nerves. Even through the heavy clouds, the sky was already growing lighter. I had to run.
If I didn't go now, then curfew would end and I would be stuck here with no hope of getting that pulley. I refused to haul dirt buckets up that ladder again, not when a much better option was within my reach.
That single thought was enough to prompt me into moving. I gave one last look in every direction and then ran. Ran like I never had before. I was blind to everything but the corner in front of me and the protection it would offer. My feet were light upon the street and I jumped the curb so there would be no chance of tripping. Then I lunged for the cove of the nearest building as if fire was at my heels. I landed in there and almost screamed.
A woman was already using that same cove to hide and looked as startled to see me as I was her. Her silky long hair was as dark as her sleek outfit, but pulled behind her in a fashion more elegant than I usually saw. She was beautiful but had clearly tried to play it down by wearing only a bare amount of makeup. I felt clumsy and plain beside her, and would've left right away if I had anywhere better to go.
Her face softened as she looked at me. "I know you. Aldous Lowe's daughter, right?"
It bothered me that she should know that, especially since I was certain I did not know her. She only smiled and said, "It looks like you're no better at staying out of trouble than he was. But your father was a very inspirational man. He meant a lot to those of us who want to see things changed here in the east."
She spoke of him like he was dead, the same way my mother often did, something I always resented. And she hadn't told me anything about herself.
Getting no reaction from me, the woman said, "It's not safe to be out here this time of night." She reached into her pocket and pulled out five Ostmarks. "Could you use this?"
Frankly, I was so relieved that she didn't demand a bribe of silence from me, I barely even thought about the fact that I was the one receiving the bribe.
She smiled when I nodded and pressed the money into my hand, then added, "Shall we agree not to have seen each other, then?"